Video from the scene showed him being put into plastic handcuffs and then led to a nearby police van.

“We have to stop hospital closures in this city,” he told reporters as he was being escorted away by police. “People are going to be much sicker in this city if we keep losing hospitals. People are going to lose their jobs. We have to fight it.”

De Blasio continued to defend his actions on Tuedsay.

“Civil disobedience is something you use when the normal governmental process isn’t functioning,” de Blasio said after his appearance at a Manhattan court, where he had gotten in line outside with others facing minor charges before court officers spotted him and took him in. “I came to the conclusion that something more dramatic had to be done to bring attention to the issue, and I’m proud to say that I think it helped bring attention to the issue.”

Disorderly conduct is a violation akin to a traffic ticket, not a crime.

A couple of weeks after the protest, de Blasio secured a court order to keep the hospital operating.

De Blasio, who is positioning himself as the most liberal candidate in a crowded Democratic field, has been arrested at protests before, including at a 2003 demonstration over the closing of a Brooklyn firehouse. He was then a city councilman.

Since 2000, 19 city hospitals have closed due to financial pressures, and several others are in trouble. After his own court date, de Blasio filed papers Tuesday asking a federal bankruptcy judge to halt the proposed shutdown of Interfaith Medical Center in Brooklyn.